


A Blessing Sweet as Gall

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [29]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Akallabêth, Gen, King's Men - Freeform, POV Female Character, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, legendarium ladies april
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 12:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18411029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: "'Death is a curse'. The words were inscribed over the dark mouth of the crypt. Inzilân accepted the lantern her attendant offered her, light flickering within glazed, frosty green glass that cast a pallid illumination over the shadowed cemetery and the thicker dark of the antechamber of the crypt. Inzilân stared into the dark, a cold touch settling on her bones. She disliked this part of her duties, disliked roaming the halls of the dead. She straightened, glad that her back was turned to the procession; it would not have done for them to see her hesitation."Back straight, Inzilân entered the crypt."





	A Blessing Sweet as Gall

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Legendarium Ladies April 6th [general prompt](http://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/post/183984469602/legendarium-ladies-april-prompts-for-april-06), ‘Religion and Rituals.’ I’ve never actually tried writing from the perspective of one of the King’s Men before; it should be interesting, since I do wonder just what the doctrine around end-time Adûnaic religion was.
> 
> [ **CN/TW** : Death]

Death was a curse.

Those were the words inscribed on the sign at the cemetery gate as Inzilân led the procession past, deeper and deeper into the cemetery itself. The path between the tombs and the crypt entrances and the soaring mausoleums was a narrow, winding one, and the shadow of the looming, forbidden Minul-târik bathed the gray day with night. The grass on the Minul-târik was a bright, poisonous green, in spite of the dry brown that crackled and broke under Inzilân’s feet. She turned her gaze away from the silent taunt the mountain represented, and towards the crypt that beckoned to her.

‘ _Death is a curse_.’ The words were inscribed over the dark mouth of the crypt. Inzilân accepted the lantern her attendant offered her, light flickering within glazed, frosty green glass that cast a pallid illumination over the shadowed cemetery and the thicker dark of the antechamber of the crypt. Inzilân stared into the dark, a cold touch settling on her bones. She disliked this part of her duties, disliked roaming the halls of the dead. She straightened, glad that her back was turned to the procession; it would not have done for them to see her hesitation.

Back straight, Inzilân entered the crypt. She did not need to say “Follow” as she descended. She knew they would. They always did.

Death was a curse. Inzilân had known this from the haziest days of her childhood. Death was a curse that had crept upon her mother, struck her down with old age long before her time. It sank its hooks in, withering like the leaves on the trees of their home withered in the merciless summers when the sun beat down on them and all prayers for rain were met with pitiless blue skies. The decrepitude had stolen over her mother, hair bleaching white from black in months, bones turning brittle as glass, body too weak to rise from the bed, mind gone. It had all been so precipitous; even one of the lesser Men not of Adûnaim stock did not age so drastically.

What sort of loving gods would do this to them? They had been longer-lived, once; the royal house had been known to live more than four hundred years. And now, with each generation that passed, the lifespan of the Adûnaim grew a little shorter. One year or two or five or ten shaved off of the whole, like a fraudster shaving coins, but just disposing of the metal instead of using it to forge new coins. What a waste it all was.

What a waste it all was, to be robbed of years that could have been spent in enjoyment of life, could have been spent furthering art and literature and science and their understanding of the world. What a waste death was at all, a needless waste, and the gods must have recognized that to give the over-mighty Nimrî eternal life, but this had been a blessing withheld from Men. Or stripped from them. A blessing they did not have, and they were gifted with the awareness of deaths’ cold, encroaching grasp instead.

Sometimes, Inzilân wondered if the gods had not given Anadûnê to the Adûnaim as a cruel jest. To give her people what had once been such a fair land, and deny them the ability to enjoy it forever, and then to command it to wither as the Adûnaim withered, it sounded like a cruel jest. To rob the Adûnaim of yet more of their years and not even allow them to console themselves with beauty, to instead turn their home into a specter of the oblivion that awaited them, if that was not cruelty, Inzilân did not know what was.

And now, she descended the smooth, hard stairs of the crypt, an act that had never ceased to feel like throwing herself into the jaws of the beast itself. The stairs just went on and on, and Inzilân could fancy she was walking straight into the oblivion of death. She always expected to be hit by a wave of putrefaction when she entered a crypt, a putrid stench so harsh as to seem as another wall holding up the ceiling of the crypt. She was always surprised when she smelled nothing more than dry earth and the rosemary and aged ambergris in her pomander. Here, Inzilân was surrounded by death, confronted on all sides by the cruelty of the gods. It was not a comfortable place.

Just as there was no reek of putrefaction within the crypt, there was no acrid scent of smoke. When Inzilân had led the procession from the gates of Ar-Minalêth, the air had been so thick with it that Inzilân and those who followed her had found themselves required to cover their mouths and noses with cloth until they were nearly a mile from the city—mercifully, the wind had carried the smoke in the opposite direction from the procession.

Inzilân was… She was glad she could not smell the smoke here. Her duties rarely saw her serving in the Temple, and she wished for few reminders of it when she was away. She was weak. She knew she was weak. But she would keep faith, nonetheless.

The stairs had been long, and Inzilân had wondered if she would ever reach the bottom, or if the stairs would just go on and on, trying to lead her towards a destination unreachable. But at last the procession reached the bottom of the stairs, and Inzilân nodded firmly as she drew ahead, just enough to let the rest of the procession spill out behind her.

The inner chamber of the crypt was touched with the dark of a starless, moonless night, and the attendant went about the task of lighting the lamps, leaving the chamber illuminated with a sickly lavender light that clashed with Inzilân’s green. What it illuminated was a sight Inzilân had grown familiar with as regards to the newer crypts commissioned by wealthy families, though the old and the poor must continue to make do with what the ancients had done with their corpses.

It was cold in the chamber, so cold that Inzilân’s breaths were followed by little puffs of silver smoke. Out of the corner of her eye, Inzilân could see that many of those who had followed her here were shivering, but she herself was reassured. The magic and technology poured into this place engendered a great deal of cold. If there had been no cold, there would have been the putrefaction Inzilân always expected and never found.

Though most of the caskets were tucked away in slots in the walls, the deceased heads of the family would be gifted more elaborate caskets set out amongst the chamber. Most of those were still empty, but two had since been filled. Inzilân passed these caskets by as she approached her destination. The bodies of the caskets were made of steel spelled to never rust. Their lids were glass that shone pale silver in the light. Within, those who were dead seemed merely to be sleeping. If only.

As her attendant drew out the casket they had come to speak over from the wall, Inzilân turned to address the rest of the procession. Their faces were distorted by the green light of her lantern and the lavender light of the lamps, but she saw what she often saw in such circumstances: grief and anger, glittering tear tracks mingled with smoldering eyes. The sight was more than familiar to her. She felt it in her own heart, always.

“Adanel the Wise of the Elder Days had this to say. When Men first awoke, they were not cursed by the shadow of death. As the Nimrî were blessed with eternal life, so too were Men. The fathers of Men lived in naïve bliss, knowing no toil or suffering, knowing no decrepitude, knowing no eternal separation.

“Our Lord came to us to teach us wisdom, but the other gods are jealous gods, and terrible in their wrath and their vengeance. That we would do homage to our Lord before we did homage to them was met with furious anger, and these jealous gods—“ her voice quavered; she could not help it “—sought to punish us.

“Because we would not devote all of our worship to them, these gods cursed us to know death. They cursed us to wither away as the plants of the field wither away in winter, cursed us to die as beasts die. No longer would we be allowed to have full enjoyment of the world. No longer would we be allowed the eternal comfort of our loved one’s company. Instead, we would grow old, and die, and our souls would be cast into the Void, lost forever to oblivion. This was the punishment we received for seeking wisdom: to be cursed with death, and to be the thralls of the Nimrî, the other gods’ faithful sheep who never strayed. The Nimrî came to us and told us lies, told us that death was a gift that had been given to us, a blessing that we should be grateful for. We should never wish for more, should never be dissatisfied with what we had been ‘given.’ This was our lot, the Nimrî said, and we should be grateful. As if a beast should be grateful for the blow that kills it, when it lies wounded on the ground.”

Inzilân turned, at last, to the coffin that her attendant had drawn out. Its occupant was a young man, struck down by illness as the Adûnaim had so rarely been in the days when they were still the gods’ faithful sheep, unquestioning, blindly obedient. He could have been sleeping, if not for the pockmarks that marred his face, if not for the grayish cast of his skin.

“But be not afraid,” she said, very softly. “For with the help of our Lord’s emissary, we will unlock the knowledge necessary to undo what the gods have done to us. We will breach the final gate, and once again be as we were always meant to be. We will lose no more of those whom we have loved.”

**Author's Note:**

> Note: of the Tale of Adanel regarding the earliest days of Men, I think the fact that _Eru spoke to Men_ is probably, no, definitely, much more significant than the idea that Men may have been immortal in the beginning. Alas, by this time, that snippet of knowledge has been lost to the Dúnedain—and you can probably thank the Exiles for that, because they would have completely freaked out at the idea that weak, inferior Men knew something about Eru that they didn’t. There’s a lot they no longer know about their earliest days, thanks to the Exiles feeling super-threatened and insecure in their superiority. Oops.
> 
>  **Adûnaim** —an Adûnaic name for the people of Númenor (Adûnaic)  
>  **Anadûnê** —Númenor (Adûnaic)  
>  **Ar-Minalêth** —the Adûnaic name of Armenelos, a direct translation (Adûnaic)  
>  **Minul-târik** —the Adûnaic name for the Meneltarma (Adûnaic)  
>  **Nimrî** —Elves (singular: Nimîr) (Adûnaic)


End file.
